Slow Steps Are Better than Standing Still

Have you ever a feeling of “when will I ever move forward?”

Of late, I’ve been going through a lot of changes which have made me wonder. My two younger daughters started a new school and my 13 year old daughter has just gone to boarding school in England, I’ve moved from a fully furnished to an unfurnished house and I’ve had to do lots of time-consuming, practical tasks such as re-buying all the domestic items of life from knives to wardrobes and everything in between. None of which particularly excites me.

Then there’s the other challenge of getting used to my new home environment.

Two nearby roosters with messed up mental clocks compete against one another over who has the loudest crow.  They start any time from midnight until 6am and very often are still at it throughout the day.

The cat has a new frequent deep, loud meow, almost a wail; as if to say ‘where I am and what am I doing here?’ and our two Bali dogs have an infestation of ticks. Having never dealt with ticks on such a large scale, I’ve been fastidiously plucking out the sucking tentacles of the white bulbous ticks with tweezers. 
Being over-zealous when I scrubbed the dogs down with medicated shampoo, I decided to leave it on them. Shortly afterwards, I heard a snarling scuffle and my children screaming, “Mummy, mummy come quickly the dogs are killing each other.”  They were fighting and biting at each other in a crazed frenzy of shampoo and blood.

Us? Fight? We're innocent, honest!

Taking quick action, I grabbed a hose pipe like a fireman about to extinguish a blazing inferno. The children and I chased the biting dogs around the garden, adding to the noise and commotion. There was carnage, mud and blood everywhere. The green lawn turned a swampy, red/brown colour and left over steamers of toilet roll used to wrap the dead ticks and flush down the toilet were strewn all over the garden. Finally, looking like we had re-enacted the battle of The Somme, we all subsided into a sweating collapsed heap, all of us panting heavily from our exertions.

It’s the unexpected challenges that can often get in our way and make us wonder if we’ll ever move on and at times like this I like to remind myself of a Chinese proverb which a participant shared with me on one of my company’s leadership development programmes:

"It's ok to be slow, as long as you are not standing still."

Rember to enjoy the journey, by definition with life it is definitely about the journey, not the destination.
Janet